Dean Radin is an American parapsychologist and the chief scientist of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California, the research body founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Trained as an electrical engineer and psychologist, he has spent more than three decades running laboratory experiments on telepathy, precognition and mind-matter interaction, effects that mainstream science does not accept as established. In 2026 he became one of the researchers most often quoted in UAP media on remote viewing and consciousness.

Radin was born on February 29, 1952. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, with honors in physics, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a master's in electrical engineering and a doctorate in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He spent about a decade in research and development at AT&T Bell Laboratories and GTE Laboratories, then held appointments at Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Nevada, Interval Research Corporation and SRI International. His own biography says that at SRI he spent a year as a visiting scientist on the classified government effort now known as Star Gate, which studied remote viewing for espionage. He joined the IONS research staff in 2001, has been an associated distinguished professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies since 2015, and is co-founder and chairman of Cognigenics, which he describes as a neuroengineering company.

Within his field Radin is a leading figure. He was elected president of the Parapsychological Association four times between 1988 and 2005, co-edits the journal Explore, and is credited by IONS with more than 175 peer-reviewed articles. His books The Conscious Universe (1997), Entangled Minds (2006), Supernormal (2013), Real Magic (2018) and The Science of Magic (2025) argue that meta-analyses of psi experiments, including studies of whether people can influence random-number generators, show effects too consistent to be chance, and propose quantum nonlocality as a possible mechanism. Critics have rejected those readings. Reviewing The Conscious Universe in Nature, statistician I. J. Good charged that it contained statistical errors and passed over known hoaxes, and psychologists David Wilson and William Shadish argued in Psychological Bulletin that the random-number-generator evidence needed a testable mechanism rather than more statistics.

His 2026 appearances carried that research into the UAP debate. In January, researcher Joe Murgia circulated a clip in which Radin said a U.S. government remote-viewing program exists that is quiet but not classified, adding that he is not involved and that publicity could endanger the people in it. On episode 2513 of The Joe Rogan Experience, released in June, he discussed remote viewing, the government psi programs and his case for psychic ability. He also suggested that some reported nonhuman beings may be ultraterrestrials, an advanced species that arose on Earth long before humans, rather than visitors from another planet.

Radin's standing rests on an unusual combination: conventional engineering credentials, a long publication record inside parapsychology and, by his own account, a year on the government's remote-viewing research at SRI. Those credentials have made him a principal scientific voice for the view that psychic phenomena and the UAP question belong to the same inquiry, even as his central claims remain outside accepted science. His 2026 Rogan interview put that argument before one of the largest audiences in podcasting.